It’s weirdly, alarmingly easy for him to figure out where her house is. It makes Sam a little nervous for her, actually: the following morning he just calls up her old agency and flirts with the assistant for a while, and before he knows it he’s plugging an address in the Valley into the search bar on his phone. The GPS chirps officiously away.
Still, when he pulls up to the curb, for a second he thinks maybe he was wrong, that this place must be some kind of decoy: the house is brick and one-story and modest, with a scrubby lawn and a purple gazing ball sitting on a pedestal to one side of the wide front window. Back when they knew each other Sam always imagined Fiona going home to a mansion in a gated community in Brentwood with a fountain in front, a thousand nannies and personal chefs and trainers running around. The car in the driveway is at least six or seven years old.
He unbuckles the bird-of-paradise from the passenger seat beside him, balancing it on one hip as he makes his way up the walk. He rings the bell, but nobody answers. He tries again, but the house stays dark. He’s about to give up when a dog starts barking; half a second later, a pit bull with shoulders broad enough to play defense for the LA Rams and a head the size of a napa cabbage comes careening around the side of the house.
Sam almost drops the plant. “Oh, shit,” he mutters, bracing himself for the impact. Leave it to Fiona St. James to have a terrifying guard dog on top of everything else. He thinks he has problems now, watch him try to book a movie with half his face ripped off and no fingers. He’s going to have to learn all the words to the Phantom of the fucking Opera.
“Brando!” a woman’s voice yells from the direction of the house next door. “Brando, no!” and suddenly there she is, stalking out of the backyard in cutoffs and a topknot. The dog drops to the ground immediately, rolling over and rubbing his back delightedly on the browning grass.
“It’s you,” Sam says, lifting his free hand in a wave.
Fiona stops short when she sees him, staring with her lips just slightly parted. In the second before she rearranges her expression into a scowl, he can tell she’s not entirely unhappy he’s here.
Mostly unhappy, sure.
But not entirely.
And Sam?
Sam can work with that.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she manages after a moment. She’s wearing a white tank top over a black sports bra, barefoot on the concrete. Sam is very, very careful to keep his eyes on her face.
“I was going to call,” he says, “but I thought you might not pick up.”
“That was very astute of you,” she says. Then, peering over his shoulder with no small amount of horror: “Is that your car?”
Sam turns and follows her gaze to where the Tesla is gleaming, freshly washed, at the curb. “. . . Yes?”
Fiona opens her mouth to respond to that, then seems to consciously decide not to, nodding instead at the plant in his arms. “What is that?”
“Oh!” he says, holding it out in her direction. “It’s a bird-of-paradise. My mom would kill me if she knew I came to somebody’s house empty-handed, so. It’s called a Wisconsin Hello. I mean, that’s what my mom calls it. We’re from Milwaukee. To be fair, it might mean something else on Urban Dictionary.”
He’s rambling. Fuck, he’s nervous. Why is he nervous? He wasn’t nervous yesterday. Fiona blinks, an expression he doesn’t recognize flickering across her face. “You brought me a plant?” she asks quietly.
“I did,” Sam admits.
“Fiona, honey?” someone calls from the backyard. “Who is it?”
Fiona’s spine straightens. “Nobody!” she calls back.
“Ouch,” Sam says, just as a woman in her seventies hobbles out into the front yard, ropes of paper towel threaded between her freshly painted toes. A teenage girl in silk pajamas follows at her heels.
“It doesn’t sound like you’re talking to—oh!” The older woman stops on the grass and abruptly rearranges herself at the sight of him, throwing her shoulders back and thrusting one hip out. “Well, hello there.” She turns to Fiona. “Who’s your guest?”
Fiona sighs theatrically. “This is Sam,” she reports. “He’s not staying.”
“I brought her a plant,” Sam offers. He smiles at the girl—Fiona’s sister, he realizes suddenly, pulling her name from the foggiest depths of his memory in a flash of utter brilliance, if he does say so himself. “Claudia, right?”
Fiona whirls on him. “How do you know that?” she demands. “You couldn’t remember Max, but you remember my little sister? What are you, some kind of perv?”
“Fiona,” the woman chides mildly, holding out one manicured hand in a way that suggests she expects Sam to kiss it. “Estelle Halliday.”
“Sam Fox,” Sam says, pressing his lips to her knuckles.
“Oh, we know,” Estelle says, as Fiona tsks in audible exasperation. “We’re big fans of your show.”
“It got shitcanned,” Fiona reports bluntly.
Estelle’s eyes widen. “Fiona!”
“Well, it did, didn’t it?” She turns back to Sam. “That’s why you came to the print shop yesterday. And that’s why you’re here.”
“He came to the shop?” Claudia asks, her eyes wide.
Fiona yanks her hair roughly out of its giant bun, flipping her head forward and massaging her scalp for a moment before righting herself so quickly that Sam almost gets whiplash just watching her. “They want to reboot Birds,” she announces.
Claudia and Estelle both startle, their expressions twin caricatures of shock sixty years apart. “They do?” Estelle asks softly.
“Why didn’t you say something?” Claudia wants to know.
“Because I’m not going to do it. Which I already told him.” She turns to Sam. “Am I wrong?” she asks, her voice rough and demanding. “Isn’t that why you’re at my house right now?”
Sam stares for a minute even though he’s trying not to. Her hair is a long, curly lion’s mane around her face, darkly golden—movie-star hair, he thinks. Her eyes glow like two hot coals. “I came to ask if you wanted to go to lunch,” he hears himself say.
Fiona gapes at him. He can see her pulse ticking in the soft, vulnerable skin of her neck. “I can’t,” she tells him flatly, at the same time as Estelle says, “She’d love to.”
Fiona glares at her. “I’ve got things to do,” she protests. “I was literally just on my way out.”
“What things?” Estelle asks.
“Costume shopping,” Fiona replies immediately, looking relieved to have an answer. “For the show.”
“Well, that seems like an activity you could do together.” Estelle turns to Sam. “She’s directing a play,” she confides. “And acting in it! People don’t realize this, but she’s very talented.”
“Estelle,” Fiona says, “Jesus.”
“Well, you are!”
“She is,” Sam agrees. “And I’d love to.”
“That’s okay,” Fiona says, holding a hand up. “I’m all set.”
“Surely it would be useful to have someone else along?” Estelle says reasonably. “To carry heavy things?”
“I love carrying heavy things,” Sam says, hoisting up the plant for emphasis. “In fact, I’ve been thinking about getting a job as a bellhop at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” He raises his eyebrows. “You know, now that my show got shitcanned.”
Fiona’s mouth does something that might or might not be a fraction of a smile, and that’s when Sam knows he’s got her. “Fine,” she announces, handing the plant off to her sister and brushing her palms off on the seat of her shorts. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Five
Fiona
“Okay,” Fiona says half an hour later, rolling her eyes at him as she tips the base of an ugly table lamp upside down to check the price tag on the bottom. “Can you stop that, please?”
“Stop what?” Sam asks. They’re standing in the housewares section of a Goodwill on the very outskirts of Hollywood, surrounded by other people’s castoffs.
“Swanning around like that,” Fiona says, setting the lamp back down on the shelf and crouching to examine a wobbly-looking end table. “Not all of us are trying to get asked for our autograph.”
Sam frowns. “I’m not swanning,” he protests, looking a little stung. “This is my normal walk.”
“It’s not just your walk,” she says, straightening up again. “It’s your whole—” She gestures at him vaguely. He’s wearing dark jeans and a pair of expensive-looking lace-up boots that are too hot for LA, a chambray shirt rolled to his elbows. A pair of sunglasses that probably cost as much as her car dangle from the ostentatiously unbuttoned V of his collar. “Forget it.”
“Also,” Sam says as he follows her down the aisle past wall décor, where half a dozen Live Laugh Love canvases teeter like cursed dominoes on a rickety metal shelf, “anyone who says they don’t want to get asked for their autograph is lying. You don’t do what we do if you don’t want to get asked for your autograph.”
“What you do,” Fiona corrects him.